Fallujah, the Guernica of Our Times, Part 4

"It was really a disastrous day for us. When we reached the heart of the city at the hospital, I almost lost my mind from the terror that I saw, people going in each and every direction. Laith was with me and also another colleague, and I felt like we need 1000 cameras to grab those disastrous pictures: fear, terror, planes bombing, ambulances taking the people dead. And I was shouting and yelling for Laith and my other colleague, and I was shouting, 'Camera! Camera!' so that we can take pictures here and there.....We were trying to move this picture to the whole world, and we felt that we were responsible for all these civilians being bombed from planes and who are threatened with death...."

Laith Mushtaq, in the same interview, recounted his very first camera shot during the siege:

"And the first shot I took with my camera...., it was for a human being....burned completely. He was a wounded person. His family was transferring him to a hospital, which was close to the U.S. forces position, and it had the Red Crescent symbol and the Red Cross, because they put him in a pickup... and that was under fire. And I saw this person, the wounded person is torched, fired, burned. Even smoke was coming out of him. I was unable to go and see that scenery.

"I left him to go alone, and I stood far, and my sight was really bad and terrible because on that day, when we went to the hospital, there was a lot of children in the hospital that were wounded. Some children were brought and their families were dead already....That day made a terrible shock to me and shocked me extremely. I covered many wars, but every time you cover a war and you see corpses and dead people and children, believe me, every child I looked at, I remember my younger daughter."

An independent journalist, author, blogger and sometimes educator at New York University, Rahul Mahajan, who runs the website, Empire Notes (www.empirenotes.org) as well, also made it into Fallujah with several compatriots during the tenuous ceasefire. He describes, in his April 12 Report from Fallujah - Destroying a Town in Order to "Save" it, dreadful scenes of carnage, of a bombed out power plant, an ambulance shot at while his friends delivered the wounded in it, of bleeding and dying civilians. To quote Rahul:

"During the course of the roughly four hours we were at that small clinic, we saw perhaps a dozen wounded brought in. Among them was a young woman, 18 years old, shot in the head. She was seizing and foaming at the mouth when they brought her in; doctors did not expect her to survive the night. Another likely terminal case was a young boy with massive internal bleeding. I also saw a man with extensive burns on his upper body and shredded thighs, with wounds that could have been made from a cluster bomb....."

Regarding George Bush's depiction of the insurgents, Rahul states:

"Among the more laughable assertions of the Bush administration is that the mujaheddin (an Iraqi term for resistance fighters) are a small group of isolated 'extremists' repudiated by the majority of Fallujah's population. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Of course, the mujaheddin don't include women or very young children, old men, and are not necessarily even a majority of fighting-age men. But they are of the community and fully supported by it. Many of the wounded were brought in by the muj and they stood around openly conversing with doctors and others."
(http://www.empirenotes.org/fallujah.html )

Rahul also estimated that over 600 Iraqis had been killed, roughly 200 of them women, over 100 of them children, with many more wounded. According to the manager of Fallujah General Hospital's latest figures, 736 Iraqis died in the April siege, some 60% of those being women, children, and the elderly. Marine Corps casualties overall were around 40 slain during Operation Vigilant Resolve.

Formal Truce in May

The intense political pressure to end the bloodshed finally led the Marine Corps to announce a formal ceasefire in early May. By now the Marines had tacit control over roughly half of the city, but General Conway of the Corps decided to take a risk and agreed to a brokered deal to hand over authority to an acceptable former Iraqi general, Major General Muhammed Latif, who was to lead the Fallujah Brigade, a new formed force of some 1000 or so Iraqis tasked with securing Fallujah for the Coalition forces, disarming the insurgents, and preventing attacks on nearby American bases. A Traffic Control Point would also be established on the eastern side of the city, to be jointly manned by Marines and Iraqi National Guardsmen. So the Marines, in essence, stepped back from the city, to watch and wait. Operation Vigilant Response had drawn to an end.

Inside Fallujah, emotions now ran high as the ominous threat of daily death and destruction abated. Mosques began proclaiming victory over the occupiers. "Allahu Akbar", "God is great!" rang out. Celebratory banners were unfurled, the mujaheddin parading around in trucks. Politically, a new dynamic had emerged in the city. The tribal elders' Civil Management Council and Mayor's office were a thing of the past. A militant, Islamist atmosphere openly defiant of the Americans now vibrated throughout Fallujah, born of the harsh conditions of the siege. The new Fallujah Brigade faced a tremendous challenge in trying to bring this new dynamic under control. And yet the future of the city depended upon it.

Next issue, Part 4:

Cruel November Approaches

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